Making Hole – Drilling Technology

Answering the call of necessity and the lure of opportunity for finding oil and natural gas at greater depths.

The modern petroleum industry’s drilling technologies evolved from the ancient spring pole to percussion cable-tools to the modern rotary rigs that can drill many miles into the earth.

Often used for drilling brine wells, a “spring-pole” well discovered oil in Appalachia. Photo from “The World Struggle for Oil,” a 1924 film by the U.S. Department of the Interior.

“A good cable-tool man is just about the most highly skilled worker you’ll find,” one historian noted. “Besides having a feel for the job, knowing what’s going on thousands of feet under the ground just from the movement of the cable, he’s got to be something of a carpenter, a steam-fitter, an electrician, and a damned good mechanic.”

– From a 1939 interview in “Voices from the Oilfield” by Paul Lambert and Kenny Franks.

“A cable tool driller knows more knots and splices than any six sailors you can find,” Lambert and Franks added during the interview. Cable-tool rigs, powered by a steam engine and boiler, included the bullwheel and drilling cable – often high-quality manila rope.

Standard cable-tool derricks stood 82 feet tall and were powered by a steam boiler and engine using a “walking beam” to raise and lower drilling tools. Image from The Oil-Well Driller, 1905.

Drilling or “making hole” began long before oil or natural gas were anything more than flammable curiosities found seeping from the ground.

For centuries, digging by hand or shovel was the best technologies that existed to pry into the earth’s secrets. Oil seeps provided a balm for injuries. Natural gas seeps – when ignited – created folklore and places called “burning springs.”

Drilling technology advanced when the spring pole harnessed the resiliency of a bent tree to assist in pummeling a hole into the ground to find water.

Ancient histories record the technique, which is still used in some corners of the world. While repeatedly kicking down a stirrup was primitive and slow, the spring pole’s rope and chisel were practical drilling technologies.

The Ruffner brothers’ tools for their spring pole probably consisted of a manila line — and a variety of chisels.

Salt was an essential commodity for preserving food and extracting it from brine was a simple process.

In 1802 in what is now West Virginia, salt brine drillers David and Joseph Ruffner took 18 months to drill through 40 feet of bedrock to a total depth of 58 feet using a spring pole.

The Ruffner brothers drilling ingenuity and innovation made the Kanawha River Valley a major salt manufacturing and distribution center in the early 1800s.

Many early drilling technologies were developed there.

“The Ruffner brothers’ well was the first well known to have been ‘drilled,’ as distinct from ‘dug,’ in the Western Hemisphere,” notes J.E. Brantly in the History of Oil Well Drilling.

The well’s historic significance rests on the “development of well drilling tools and practices, which became almost immediately standard equipment used by many other well drillers in the new salt industry.”

There was money to be made from brine wells. The rapidly growing number of settlers in the frontier needed a lot of salt to preserve food.

However, sometimes a good well would be fouled with the intrusion of unsought and unwanted oil. The rainbow sheen and pungent smell of oil was bad news to brine drillers.

Chiseling a Hole with Cable Tools

The advent of cable-tool drilling introduced the wooden derrick into the changing American landscape. Using the same basic notion of chiseling a hole deeper and deeper into the earth. Adding the miracle of steam power and clever mechanical engineering, wells could be drilled far more efficiently.

Frequent stops were needed to remove the chipped-away rock and other material, bail out water – and sharpen the bit. Bull wheels and hemp rope repeatedly hoisted and dropped heavy iron drill strings and a curious variety of bits deep into the borehole. Oil was still an adversary to those in search of either fresh water or brine.

However, savvy businessmen like the Ruffner brothers and Samuel Kier of Tarentum, Pennsylvania, learned to profit from this oil.

It had long been recognized that oil could be collected and used as a medicine, lubricant, and even a foul-smelling, smoky illuminant. American Indians gathered oil by using blankets to soak it up from natural seeps. The Ruffner brothers sold their oil to marketers of patent medicines and lubrication products.

Oil from natural seeps had been used as a balm by Native Americans. In 1848, Samuel Kier bottled and sold “Rock Oil” proclaiming its “Wonderful Medical Virtues.”

George Bissell became determined to make lamp fuel from natural oil seeps he saw in northwestern Pennsylvania. Bissell gave samples to Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman, who found the oil could be distilled into a quality kerosene illuminant. The world would soon change forever. Bissell formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company with the idea of using cable tool drilling to extract oil the oil seeps at Oil Creek near Titusville. It worked, and the petroleum age was born.

Kier soon abandoned his patent medicine and went into the kerosene refining business, buying all the oil he could get. Edwin L. Drake’s August 27, 1859, discovery of commercial quantities of oil at 69. 5 feet brought America’s first drilling boom — and virtually created an industry. Soon, cable-tool wooden derricks were everywhere, pounding into the earth, searching for oil.

In June 1860, J.C. Rathbone used a steam engine to drill a 140-foot-deep well on the bank of the Great Kanawha River, within the city limits of what is now Charleston, West Virginia. His discovery well produced about 100 barrels of oil a day.

In Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, the soft soil yielded to cable-tool drilling. But as wells got deeper, some drilling experts found resistant rock strata that made progress far more difficult. Sometimes the drilling stools got stuck, threatening the well. See Fishing in Petroleum Wells.

Rotary Rigs cut Faster, Deeper

Rotary drilling introduced the hollow drill stem that enabled broken rock debris to be washed out of the borehole.

A new technology answered the call of necessity and the lure of opportunity. Rotary drilling is most often associated with the spectacular 1901 Spindletop Hill discovery near Beaumont, Texas.

Instead of the repetitive lift and drop of heavy cable-tool bits, rotary drilling introduced the hollow drill stem that enabled broken rock debris to be washed out of the borehole with re-circulated mud while the rotating drill bit cut deeper.

Rotary drilling uses fluids (drilling mud) to circulate out the rock as it is chipped away. The fluid washes out the drill hole as it goes, making the process more efficient. By applying downward pressure, drilling mud also stops an oil well from bursting forth unexpectedly – the dangerous and wasteful gushers.

Meanwhile, grinding their way through layers of rock rather than pounding, the heavy fishtail bits made history. Rotary rigs soon became the preferred means of drilling for oil, although to this day they still share the oil patch with a few cable-tool rigs.

The record depth recorded for a cable-tool rig is 11,145 feet. On Russia’s Kola Peninsula, a rotary rig reached more than 40,000 feet after ten years of drilling.

Equipping a Rotary Rig

Today, the latest technologies are used for rotary drilling and production, explains John Bestoloffe on a website about the Eagle Ford shale in South Texas – one of the most actively drilled formations in the United States since 2010.

Although much improved for efficiency and safety, modern rotary rigs still include the basic components applied more than a century ago. Below are the descriptions Bestoloffe offers in his Anatomy of an Oil Rig.

Swivel – a big handle that holds the weight of a drill string and allows the string to rotate, making a pressure tight seal on the drilling hole.

Drill String – made up of the drill pipe (normally sections of drill pipe are about 30 feet and are connected together) and drill collars which fit around the pipe in order to put weight on the drill bit.

Howard Hughes Sr. of Houston, Texas, received a patent in 1909 for a drill that “relates to boring drills.”

Drill Bit – the very end of the drill which is capable of cutting through rock.

Bits can come in many different sizes and shapes and can be made of various materials including diamond and carbide steel. Drill bits are specialized for different types of rock formations and drilling tasks.

Rotary or Turntable – the component that drives rotating motion by utilizing power from electric motors.

Kelly – a four or six-sided pipe that will transfer the rotary motion to the rotary table and drill string.

Twin Cones of Howard Hughes Sr.

Fishtail bits became obsolete in 1909 when Howard Hughes Sr. introduced the twin-cone roller bit. History remembers several men who were trying to develop better drill bit technologies, but it was Hughes who made it happen.

The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) notes that about the same time Hughes developed his bit, Granville A. Humason of Shreveport, La., patented the first cross-roller rock bit, the forerunner of the Reed cross-roller bit.

Biographers note that Howard Hughes Sr. met Granville Humason in a Shreveport bar, where Humason sold his roller bit rights to Hughes for $150.

The University of Texas’ Center for American History has a rare 1951 recording of Humason’s recollections of that chance meeting. Humason recalls he spent $50 of his sale proceeds at the bar during the balance of the evening.

While waiting for approval of the patent in 1909, Hughes and and business partner Walter B. Sharp had a machine shop manufacture a prototype bit to test in the field. Their secret drilling experiment took place near Houston.

In June the partners loaded their newly cast steel bit on a horse-drawn wagon and took it to the Goose Creek oilfield, according to historian Donald Barlett.

After stopping at an oil well that had defied conventional drills, the men ordered field hands away and secretly brought out the bit and attached it to the pipe stem of the rotary rig. For the next 11 hours, the bit bored through 14 feet of solid rock, “a feat so miraculous for the time that drillers dubbed the mysterious device the “rock eater.”

Hughes took over the tool company after Sharp died in 1912. Rotary drilling with the new bit soon revolutionized the search for petroleum by allowing deeper wells through harder rock formations.

In 1933, Hughes engineers invented the tricone bit, which drilled holes straighter and faster, according to Nicholas Lemann of Texas Monthly.

“For the 17 years that the patent on it ran (1934 through 1951) Hughes’s market share approached 100 per cent,” Lemann writes in a 1982 article. “The bit found virtually all the oil discovered in the glory days of wildcatting, and Howard Junior got to be the richest man in the world.”

Howard Hughes Jr. took the tool company public in 1972 and made $150 million, Lemann notes in “Texas Pimer: The Hughes Drill Bit.” With the money earned from drill bits, Hughes made dozens of movies, took over Trans World Airways, “and built a good chunk of Las Vegas, among other things.”

Innovations by others accompanied the advancements in drilling time and depth. Frank Christensen and George Christensen developed the earliest diamond bit in 1941. The tungsten carbide tooth came into use in the early 1950s. The company Hughes founded would merge in 1987 with another founded in 1913 by Carl Baker – the Baker Casing Shoe Company (renamed Baker Oil Tools in 1928).

Howard Hughes Jr. will greatly expand the petroleum service company fortune created by his father, who paid $150 for the rights to the roller bit.

In 1990, Baker Hughes purchased the Christensen company, which in 1992 resulted in the first rolling cone bit company and first diamond bit company becoming today’s Hughes Christensen, a Baker Hughes company.

How did a Derrick get its Name?

Today a noun commonly defined as “a hoisting apparatus employing a tackle rigged at the end of a beam,” or a “framework or tower over a deep drill hole (as of an oil well) for supporting boring tackle,” the word derrick originated in 17th century English sailors’ gallows humor.

Elizabethan sailors hoisting cargo from London’s Thames River docks observed that the process bore a macabre resemblance to the monthly hangings held at Tyburn, about two miles from Newgate prison. The executioner, who served Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, was Thomas Derrick, and his name became associated with dockside loading rigs. By 1656 Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (dictionary) recorded that the term was in common use “for a hangman because one of that name was not long since a famed executioner at Tiburn.”